All 5,848 of them! Attached to just over 1,600 separate blog posts. And all it took was translating from XML to text to Excel to CSV, into a Prolog routine to join them up (mostly) with the appropriate blog posts, then back to excel, then CSV, back to text, then into MySQL.

Thanks again, BackBlog, for using a completely different indexing system than the blogs of your clients.

Anyway, all of our myriad and epic conversations are again there for viewing. A few may be attached to the wrong posts, so just sound off if you see any such.

*dancedancedance*

Categories: Happy Happy Joy Joy
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Pub-goers were startled and amazed by what appeared to be a number of glowing objects over Stratford-on-Avon. Includes Video. Link

Categories: Evil Space Monkeys
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• What would you do if you knew you could not fail?




• If you could change or create one law, what would it be?




• If you had 2 minutes to speak to the world population all at once, what would you say?




• What would your ideal city be like?

(stolen from Tiny Gigantic)

Categories: Introspection
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“She will have to wear sunglasses to protect her eyes from the beauty of your penis.”

It’s such a shame that wonderful prose like this has to remain anonymous.

Categories: Thank You Internet!, Technology Porn, arses
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Tesla is at it again.

The observation they make there with republicans defending the status quo… on subsidies to produce oil really boggles my mind. Republicans != Smaller government.

The thought here, in my little head, is that full performance battery electric vehicles would thrive without government help.
The trick is getting the government to stop helping everybody else.

Categories: Technology Porn
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Apparently Fox News, and briefly CNN, were running a story on Israeli spying in America, and since then all references have been pulled from large-scale media outlets. Anybody know what’s going on? Here’s one story about what all this spy network as allegedly been up to, and here’s another at Indymedia about the ongoing attempt to bury it. While we can assume that everybody spies on everybody else, the muted buzz on this seems to imply that it’s not the usual benign reciprocal spying among allies that’s going on here. At the very least, the idea of stories being killed, buried, and forgotten creeps me out more than their actual content. So sound off if you know more.

Update: Here’s more detail from Salon, which is the highest-profile publication in which I’ve even been able to find references to this.

Categories: Wot's All This Then?
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After years of complaining about Blogger and planning a grand migration, we’ve finally done it.  Welcome to Bored Athenians 2.0!  Let the unqualified ontological metacommentary continue!

Categories: Introspection
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BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man who startled his neighbors when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathized with his technical frustrations.

Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday.

Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was.

Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.

“Who hasn’t felt like doing that?” said a police spokesman.

While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.

Categories: arses
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UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area. ”

So they say. Link

(from boingboing)

Categories: Wot's All This Then?
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I think I may be a little late to the party, but Hot Chicks With Douchebags may be my favorite thing on the internet. Look at these guys. What has MTV done to our country? This site looks like 1987 threw up, complete with chunks of hairgel, fake tans, and Miami Vice. Check out the Hall of Scrote to get a glimpse of my favorite pic of all.

LINK

Categories: Uncategorized
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Since I am a lowly grad student and a little short on money, I’ve spent a good deal of time lately perusing the job postings. And once again I’m reminded of how incredibly unrealistic they are. I imagine they are unrealistic in all domains, but I think it might be particularly bad in the world of I.T. For instance, there are a lot of postings that REQUIRE the following:

- 4 years of J2EE experience
- 4 years of .NET architecture development
- Proven success with Oracle datamining and performance optimization
- Blah
- Blah
- Blah

Salary = $45,000 - $55,000.

Now, anyone with even a little bit of experience realizes that if you find someone who REALLY knows one of those first 3 things, you should hire them and give them about 30 or 40 thousand more than that. Of course, every company wants to hire a grossly overqualified person for next to nothing, but I get the feeling that the people doing the hiring (or at least the people creating the job description) probably have no idea what they are talking about. These are just words to them. Do they imagine Java to be just slightly more difficult than Excel? I’m guessing yes. And then I found this posting on Craig’s List.

** Proven track record (minimum of 10 years) developing .NET technical architectures on time and within budget, ideally in a high transaction volume systems environment.
** Excellent understanding of design best practices with .NET technology.
** Minimum of 10 years experience with .NET

The emphasis is mine. 10 years experience with .NET. 10 years! Wow they’re going to have a really difficult time finding qualified applicants because, if my memory serves me right, Microsoft didn’t come out with .NET until 2001 or 2002. For those of you counting, that’s 5 years. Maybe 6.

And this is my problem with these job descriptions. I’ve spent my adult life being honest on my resume, and being honest in interviews. And I’ve had pretty good success. But every time I see one of these postings, I get the feeling that the people making the real money at these jobs are just the ones who are willing to say whatever the interviewers want to hear.

Categories: Uncategorized
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Green Wing as Queen

Photography by Karl J Kaul

Categories: Uncategorized
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